ENESCUPiano Sonata No.3Suite Op.18

Saskia Giorgini

The wonder has for me always been that moment where the mind reaches a state of perfect quietness, and is perceptive and ready to be carried to other worlds or - as I like to think of it – to “the other side”. The idea of crossing the border, or making it disappear, between the outer, finite exterior world of things and the inner, infinite world of the mind, with its limitless possibilities, has always been incredibly fascinating to me. A constant exploring of this mysterious matter results in the most amazing feeling of freedom. I like to imagine the performer as a modern version of Dante’s Virgil, guiding the listener around a world where everything is possible.

During World War One, Enescu used to play for the wounded every day “I have often noticed how great an uplifting of the spirit could be seen in the faces of the wounded after the first notes. This transformation of the soul is the supreme raison-d’être of music”.

It is difficult to describe Enescu’s music in just a few words. There is, as the scholar Noel Malcolm has said, no rhetoric, no commenting on events, but rather a trusting submission to them. For me, it is a bit like witnessing one’s thoughts freely flowing, developing, disappearing and reappearing as something else. The result is something rather complex but completely honest and deeply human, at the same time sounding natural and almost improvised.

Enescu was one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century. He studied in Vienna and Paris (where he was a student of Fauré and Massenet), yet he still remains largely unknown, mainly due to the economic and political dislocations of the first half of the twentieth century, and to his own total lack of interest in self-promotion.

Suite Op.181 I. Melodie 2’472 II. Voix de la steppe 3’313 III. Mazurk Mélancolique 5’584 IV. Burlesque 5’205 V. Appassionato 4’216 VI. Chorale 7’007 VII. Carillon nocturne 5’51

Piano Sonata No.3 in D Op.24 No.38 I. Vivace con brio 5’239 II. Andantino cantabile 9’0310 III. Allegro con spirito 7’37

GEORGE ENESCU 1881 — 1955

Saskia Giorgini piano

Recording 21-22 September 2018, Westvestkerk, Schiedam, The NetherlandsProducer and editing: Peter ArtsPiano Technician: Danilo CosucciPhotos Saskia Giorgini: © Julia WeselyPiano: Bösendorfer, Model 280VC℗ & © 2019 Piano ClassicsPiano Classics is a trade name of Brilliant Classics B.V.

absorbed all the information – speed, colours, articulations, voicing - the music comes alive with the most charming feeling of improvisation, not at all studied.

Fascinating, exotic at times, with French “air”. A descriptive, sublimated and rarefied heterophony and polyrhythmia, with the most sensitive sense for timbres, having a very distinct folk character without really quoting any material. Enescu created his very own musical original language, creating folk material of his own, incorporated into his personal world of musical expression.

The popular belief is that Enescu is a “folk composer”, but he was much more. Rumanian music is a mixture of harmonies from different influences: Arabic, Slavic, Hungarian, but it has its very own character that is derived from all these influences. Enescu describes it as “sadness even in the midst of happiness. Dreaming, and a tendency, even in fast sections, towards melancholy” because of its constant natural shifting between major and minor. The word “dor”, meaning yearning or longing, is what permeates Rumanian music, a sort of mixture of what the Germans call Sehnsucht and the French, spleen.

Imagine a most prodigiously gifted musician together with the genius mind and memory of a renaissance man and the most gentle and generous soul.

Enescu was not only a composer, he was a violinist, a teacher to a whole generation of violinists (among them Ida Haendel, Yehudi Menuhin, Christian Ferras, Ivry Gitlis, Arthur Grumiaux, and Uto Ughi), an equally brilliant pianist (there are different recordings of the same sonata n3 for violin and piano one with Enescu on the violin with Dinu Lipatti at the piano, one at the piano with Serge Blanc on the violin) and a conductor (considered at some point as a possible replacement for Toscanini as permanent conductor at the New York Philharmonic).

Enescu was an extremely generous person, helping fellow composers and musicians like Lipatti (his godson), Haskil, Constantinescu. His playing fully reflected his motto “Technique can be summed up in one word: music”, focusing only on the music and almost cancelling himself from the picture, with expression being everything. He was a master in bending time and could like no one else reproduce human voice, with the deepest moving and melancholic vibrato and thrills.

The same principles apply to his music. The interpreter might feel at first intimidated by his extremely detailed notation and instructions. I have never seen a wider range of indications of expression and moods : “niente”, “delicatamente armonioso”, “misterioso”, “mormorando”, “pensieroso”, “languido”, “senza lentezza, eguale, semplice”, “nostalgico”, “patetico”, “senza espressione, lontano”, “non legato”, “staccato secco”, “poco legato”, “un poco staccato”, “non troppo legato”, “appassionato con intensità”.

I know no other works more edited or marked, still the reward of a possibly complete true reading is almost an epiphany: once, as a performer, you have

from popular dances, joking accents, cymbalon sounds, it could somehow be the soundtrack to a Charlie Chaplin movie); Appassionato (to me the most open and honest love declaration, with very French coloured harmonies). The two final pieces, Chorale and Carillon Nocturne, are connected, both by an “attacca” and by thematic material. Enescu worked on it in his summer residency in Sinaia, the “Carpathian Pearl”. Such evocative music: we hear the wonderful orthodox male choirs that in Romania have a lighter colour than in Russia; we hear monastery bells, resounding and travelling endless spaces, that create an almost three dimensional ancestral atmosphere with clusters of fifths, sixths and sevenths, always three or four dynamic degrees under the main tones, with a two octave range.

For Yehudi Menuhin Enescu remained “the Absolute by which I judge all others... the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician and the most formative influence I have ever experienced”.

© Saskia Giorgini

The Sonata Op.24 No.3, written between 1932 and 1935, after completing his opera “Oedipe” in 1932, represents a culminating point in his compositions.

This masterpiece is the product of probably the most difficult and painful period of Enescu’s life: in 1933 the love of his life, Maruca Cantacuzino had a mental collapse, from which she would never really recover.

The most striking aspect here is the concept of unity: the whole piece is built on the same thematic material (basically two motives), that, through the most unexpected and fascinating transformational process, in a continuous flow – culminating in the last movement - unify the work.

An almost neoclassical opening undergoes transformations, becoming increasingly chromatic and modal; in the second movement, probably one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know, we find a sublimation of folk idioms, in longing and endless lines of a “doina”, that are entwined, repeated, overlapping and driving us into the most fascinating (and dark!) heterophonic world until it all rarefies in the air.

The last movement, remarkably, does not present any unheard material We witness an increasingly exciting and unexpected recombination of

material from the preceding two movements that undergoes a constant transfiguration and fracturing, in a progressive accelerating and densifying motion. This is to me inebriating, a magic jungle.

Written between 1913 and 1916, Enescu thought the Suite Op.18 had been lost and it was rediscovered only after his death. It is charmingly simple music, from which the threats of impending and actual war are absent. There are seven pieces: Mélodie (the most simple and beautiful melody); Voix de la steppe (with a darker evocative atmosphere); Mazurk Mélancolique (a French melancholic slow version of the dance); Burlesque (with its sketches

SASKIA GIORGINI

Winner of the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg in 2016, where she also got the special prize for the best interpretation of the commissioned work, Ms Giorgini received her first piano lessons at the age of four. At fifteen she was admitted to the piano academy “Incontri col Maestro” in Imola, where she studied with Franco Scala, Riccardo Risaliti and Leonid Margarius. At the same time she graduated from the Conservatorio in Torino with Claudio Voghera, with the highest grades and honours.

She then completed her studies at the Accademia di Musica di Pinerolo with Enrico Pace, in Graz with Julius Drake (Liedbegleitung), and at the Mozarteum Salzburg with Pavel Gililov.

Saskia Giorgini has appeared in acclaimed recitals and live radio recordings in important halls and Festivals, among them Lingotto–Hall in Turin, Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Concerti del Quirinale in Rome, Meistersingerhalle in Nürnberg, Liederhalle in Stuttgart, Großer Saal Mozarteum in Salzburg, Konzerthaus and Muzikverein in Wien, Philharmonia Skt. Petersburg, Eindhoven Muziekgebouw, MiTo Settembre Musica Festival, Unione Musicale, Vancouver Summer Festival, Warsaw’s Filharmonia Narodowa, Seoul Arts Center, International Piano Festival in China…

She has played together with important orchestras, such as Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Lodz Philharmonic Orchestra in Poland, CBC Radio Orchestra in Canada, under the baton of conductors as Eliahu Inbal, Simon Gaudenz, Antonello Manacorda.

A special affinity for chamber music brings her regularly together with renowned partners: Ian Bostridge, Martin Fröst, Janine Jansen, Gilles Apap and many others.

Saskia Giorgini is a Bösendorfer Artist.